Special guest

Hello everybody! Today the blog has an special guest, our colleague Gonzalo Mucientes Sandoval, who took part in the NAFO surveys in 2013 and during his time off filmed and produced several interesting videos. Gonzalo has been very generous and has shared them with us, so they will be published here over the next months. We start today with the arrival of R.V. Vizconde de Eza to St.John's at the end of Platuxa 2013. If you speak Spanish, we recommend you check out Gonzalo's blog, http://blueecology.wordpress.com/ . Besides, Gonzalo contributes today with this text in which he shares his contagious enthusiasm for nature and gives some food for thought:

Some of us feel an unbeatable attraction that drags us to explore life sustaining spaces or to visit isolated territories that remain uncorrupted and wild. They are the reflection of a lost world, a memory of how the world was before man tamed nature, proliferating so successfully and carrying out the industrial revolution. Prestigious scientist Edward O. Wilson, father of Sociobiology and the unmissable concept of “biodiversity”, described this very same feeling in his book Biophilia: the connection or empathy with other life forms that populate the planet and awake our curiosity or thirst for knowledge. Truth is, I feel very identified with some paragraphs from another of Wilson's books, Naturalist. Wilson describes in it his first interactions with the natural world as a kid, developing an increasing curiosity and dedication for and towards living beings. He started, obviously with those species surrounding his family home in Alabama, EEUU. One of the first encounters he remembers was with a stingray. Much later and already as a university student he shared more ambitious trips with equally inspired friends, something I also did. Nowadays, Wilson is the most prestigious taxonomist in the world of myrmecology, or the study of ants.

The morphological diversity of each kingdom, phylla, class, order and family is hugely fascinating, the architecture of the world around us, the inmense divergence of life forms (both current and those that inhabitated the planet in past ages), whose archetypes were initially described by Ernst Haeckel (German biologist and philosopher, 1834-1919), in his famous and successful book General Morphology of the Organisms, published in 1866. These life forms reach their most extreme evolutionary extravagances in the oceans, where we can find even whole communities completely disconnected and independent of solar energy, as if they were extraterrestrial organisms.

But life forms in general cannot be considered as isolated entities, they cannot be separated from the systems and habitats containing them in an equilibrium of intra- and interspecific relationships still very complex to understand. The British scientist James Lovelock, who formulated the very well known Gaia hypothesis, says that the Earth could be considered a living organism capable of autorregulation if certain thresholds are not crossed. Otherwise, massive chain extinctions could occur as it has happened several times before, for reasons not well understood and that have leaded to the natural world as we know it today.

With a population of 7000 million humans destroying, degrading and contaminating a large part of the existing habitats, both marine and terrestrial, our planet still conserves extremely productive habitats. Thus, marine biologists believe that our ultimate goal is to guarantee the sustainable exploitation of marine resources, always trying to keep habitat degradation to a minimum and optimizing their production. While the human population keeps growing we have the moral obligation to ensure susteinability...